Tolerance is a Vice

I would not be writing this in a world in which people really did condemn others who were not exactly the same as themselves. But in today's world tolerance has indeed become a vice. When it means you allow all sorts of aberrant behaviour and equate the sinful with the virtuous or the bad with the good, it descends into lack of discrimination and lowered standards. Then it is a sign not of a humane society but a corrupted one in which culture and civilisation are declining from an enlightened state to a barbarous one. This is where we are now.

There is no true civilisation which is not based on an awareness of the spiritual. This may be expressed in many different ways but in all of them the transcendent is regarded as an absolute good and the model on which life on Earth should be patterned. There is a recognition that we are natural beings but also spiritual ones and the natural, without being denied, should always conform to the spiritual. This necessarily creates hierarchy and all true civilisations are indeed hierarchical though with the proviso that all parts of the hierarchy are respected and the higher exists to serve the whole not itself. An analogy with the human body is frequently used.

So much trouble comes from the misuse of words and of not defining them correctly. Tolerance can mean putting up with something that you feel to be annoying or it can mean allowing something that is objectively wrong, but these are two quite different things. Annoying is just a personal matter. Wrong is universal. I can be tolerant of a baby crying in my train carriage but not tolerant of someone hitting the baby. Even liberals would acknowledge that but when it comes to behaviour that conflicts with the pattern of heaven, they are not so observant. This is because they do not acknowledge a pattern of heaven but that is a deficit within themselves. It's not because, as they might claim, religious belief is a personal matter that should not be imposed on others. Every society imposes beliefs of some sort. Modern liberals certainly do or try to. But an awareness of the spiritual is within each human soul unless that awareness is crushed by the outer world and the ideologies it might impose on the soul. But even then the soul has its own freedom and a soul true to its inner nature should still acknowledge the reality and supremacy of the spiritual. God exists within each one of us. We may choose not to acknowledge him because he doesn't force himself, but he is there.

Any single virtue if emphasised to the exclusion of other virtues becomes a vice. If it is given disproportionate attention it tips over from being a good to a bad thing. This is easy to see when courage becomes foolhardiness or prudence cowardice. Chastity can become cold sterility, patience can become inertia, kindness weakness and so on. In our day tolerance has become an excuse for laxness and the disregard of spiritual truth to pander to human feelings. This is a sure sign of a corrupt society, one that seeks pleasure and to avoid pain of any sort. Earthly pain is always regarded as an evil instead of being a sign that we are in this world to learn to overcome our attachments to the lower self and its desires.

It is often instructive to seek out the root meaning of words. Tolerance comes from a Latin word meaning to endure, specifically pain or hardship. Hence it means to put up with without complaint. But to go from that to accepting what is wrong in the name of an all things are equally valid ideology or believing that the existence of something is its own justification is a complete deformation of meaning. Here is yet another example of how when you remove the over-arching yardstick of a spiritual absolute nothing means anything.